WELL, what a few days it was over the Christmas season! Not only did Reform UK surpass the Conservative Party membership on Boxing Day, but Kemi Badenoch created a media sensation by accusing Nigel Farage and Reform UK of falsifying their numbers.
In fact Reform UK had been talking for some time about the moment that the ‘crossover’ of respective memberships would occur and, given the rate of growth in Reform members, it was (a) to be expected at some point in early 2025 and (b) mighty foolish of Kemi to comment on it when it happened sooner rather than later.
Not only did she rise to the bait when Farage projected their membership tracker on the Tory HQ in Matthew Parker Street, but her accusation of fakery allowed Farage to make hay with her. He not only threatened to sue her for defamation if she did not apologise but challenged her to an audit by one of the big four accountancy firms on both parties’ membership numbers. Check? Rumours now afloat are that the public membership figure of 131,680 for the Conservatives is, to put it politely, generous and that it may be significantly lower. Checkmate.
What lies beneath this ill-tempered hubris from the Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition? It has not been a good year for the Conservatives, not least due to their historic defeat in July and the humbling of the parliamentary party from an 80-seat majority to 121 seats. There have been some high-profile defections: Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a former darling of the conservative right, is now the Reform UK candidate to become Greater Lincolnshire Mayor in May. Commentator Tim Montgomerie has also joined Reform UK – in some ways an even more significant defection than Dame Andrea – for, as founder of Conservative Home, he once was the voice of compassionate conservatism and moral ‘soul’ of the party. Now he says he cannot support them any more. Just before Christmas, as if to rub salt in the wound, billionaire donor Nick Candy abandoned the Tory ship to become the Reform Party treasurer on a mission to raise funds: cue an Elon Musk summit at Trump’s place with Farage and talk of a $100million mega-donation. Whether that money still stands after Elon Musk rounded on the Reform UK party leader yesterday is anyone’s guess. There’s no doubt Mr Farage communicated loud and clear is that he is nobody’s lackey, however rich.
Since the election, there’s been a drip-drip of Tory councillors defecting to Reform – at least nine in the last quarter of 2024, all citing variations of: ‘the Tory brand is broken’, ‘we want to be able to serve our constituents to the fullest’ and we are ‘really fed up with the way things are going’. And it is unlikely to stop. Could this trickle turn into a flood with the council elections in May? That’s the question. Then there are the Conservative voters. A poll by Techne UK suggests that one in five of the voters who backed Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives in the general election in July has now switched to Reform.
But perhaps the real reason for the chagrin from Badenoch and other senior Tories is their feeling that Reform UK has stolen their clothes, clothes they don’t dare or want to wear! Much of Reform UK’s political agenda and policies would have looked very much at home in a Conservative Party manifesto of the late nineties and even early noughties, but not any more. Those clothes – Thatcherite conservatism – were cast aside long ago by the Tories. Beginning with David Cameron and continuing with May, Johnson and Sunak (in other words by all but Liz Truss) they put on the clothes of Blairism, social liberalism and centre-left state socialism.
Fourteen years of Tory rule gave us a botched Brexit, mass legal immigration, illegal immigration out of control with a de facto open border, free speech under attack with the likes of ‘non-crime hate incidents’, public institutions and education captured by cultural Marxism underwritten by the Equality Act, the imposition of job-destroying Net Zero ideology, spiralling public debt, the highest taxes since World War II and satisfaction with public services at an all-time low.
But when the Conservatives had a golden opportunity to press the reset button during the recent leadership election and admit they had taken the wrong political turning, what did they do? They stuck their heads in the sand and, in electing Badenoch, chose the continuity candidate, opting for business as usual with a leader unwilling to commit herself. Despite the dire and out-of-control state of illegal immigration, she still won’t admit that the UK needs to quit the European Convention on Human Rights; that only then can the UK’s border be legally enforced. If that is not a sign that she is an establishment stooge, I don’t know what is.
The Conservatives have only themselves to blame for their implosion. As Farage has said many times, the reason that Reform UK exists is because the Conservative Party is no longer ‘conservative’. Every week Reform UK further displaces the Tories and rightfully claims the centre-right ground in politics.
Reform UK is the de facto opposition to the government. The former Tory Cabinet Minister Lord Frost admitted it last week, raising the question of whether he will be Reform’s next high-profile defector: ‘It was Reform that put big questions like NHS reform on the agenda at the general election . . . It was Nigel Farage who this week pointed out that we need to fix the vast and growing liability of public-sector pension spending . . . Farage tells us in his New Year’s message that we are a country in “societal decline and economic decline”. Kemi Badenoch asks us to “watch this space”.’
Who knows what 2025 may bring? At time of writing (Sunday afternoon) Reform membership is running 44,000 ahead of the Conservative Party, for which Nigel made sure he thanked Kemi on social media.
With this kind of momentum and trajectory, how long will it be before Reform eclipses the Labour Party’s membership (366,604 last March) too? As Kemi Badenoch says, watch this space.
